Thucydides in Moscow

The great historian of concepts Reinhart Koselleck is one of my intellectual heroes; it’s one of my great regrets that I didn’t discover his work until it was too late (he died in 2006) to agitate for Bristol to give him an honorary degree – he spent some time as a student at the university, and then returned as a lecturer between 1954 and 1956. Since I’m currently in Bielefeld, where he was a key figure in the establishment of the Faculty of Historical Studies and was Professor fuer Theorie der Geschichte from 1973 until his retirement in 1988, I’m trying to make time to read as much of his work as possible, given that I can access a load of stuff that simply isn’t available in the UK.

One thing that’s striking, given the current focus of my interests, is how often he brings up Thucydides as a key example;

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The History Woman

She was, clearly, a remarkable but polarising figure: politically radical; internationally celebrated, especially in America, if not notorious; a pioneer as a woman working in a male-dominated field who both insisted on the irrelevance of her gender and drew attention to it. Until yesterday, I had never heard of Catharine Macaulay (1731-91; born  Sawbridge, later Graham), the eighteenth-century historian, but after a happy hour or so in the library reading some of her works I’m now something of a fan. Her eight-volume History of England interpreted it as a never-ending struggle to win back the freedom and rights that had been enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons but then crushed by the Normans and suppressed as far as possible by every subsequent dynasty; she also anticipated Mary Wollstonecraft in arguing that the apparent inferiority of women was simply a result of their mis-education. She commented on the ideas of both Burke and Hobbes – works which I haven’t yet been able to read – and was an acquaintance of George Washington and other American revolutionaries.

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Thucydides in the Modern World

I was asked to contribute to a conference last week in Peru, on Thucydides and Athenian Democracy, and so have recorded my first video lecture; as it had to be loaded onto YouTube anyway for them to view it, it makes sense to make it more widely available now. Well, except for the fact that it’s rather long and rather dull; since it’s the first time I’ve used the software, I was so worried about getting it right that I lost track of time, and the tech people felt it would be better if they did the editing so I haven’t been able to weed out the more tedious and repetitive bits. If I had my time over again I’d probably have more of me and less of the Powerpoint slides, just for a bit of variety. Anyway, if you’ve nothing better to do for half an hour, this offers a sort of introduction to some of the things we’ve been doing on the Reception of Thucydides project…

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Live Long And Prosper

This blog is likely to be rather quiet over the next month, as I have to get my head down and finish my book on Thucydides and the Idea of History and so won’t have time to write extended essays on here, and no one else ever seems to contribute anything. However, I couldn’t resist sharing the latest example of the place of Thucydides in contemporary popular culture: the Thucydides class Federation starship:

This has at least some sort of formal status within the universe of Star Trek and its licensed products, though my impression is that it derives from a role-playing game rather than any of the series or films. Apparently (I quote) the Thucydides was conceived as the Federation’s first timeship in response to the rising number of temporal refugees discovered to be traveling through time by the Department of Temporal Investigations; they were very small, maneuverable ships designed to travel to other time periods and recover people and items that could possibly contaminate a timeline. All of which seems very appropriate; after all, calling such vessels the Herodotus class would presumably entail traveling back in time and grabbing a random selection of people and things that looked interesting; the Tacitus class would go back to make sarcastic remarks about people, and so forth.

I am now waiting with bated breath to see what this post does to my blog statistics; am I now going to attract a lot of annoyed Star Trek fans to argue about the limits of the canon, or a lot of even more annoyed Tacitus scholars..?

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Of all Manifestations of Power…

…restraint impresses men most. Or so it has been said: by Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State and before that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on many occasions; by President Lyndon B. Johnson, some thirty years earlier, in a speech at the Annual Swedish Day Picnic in Minneapolis; by a number of writers and scholars, at least some of whom should have known better; and by an alarmingly large number of websites. By Thucydides, however, not at all, although the line is attributed to him in the majority of cases. Since 2004, it has been reasonably well established that the quote is not to be found in any extant English translation (see Shifra Sharlin, ‘Thucydides and the Powell doctrine’, Raritan 24.1 (2004), pp. 12-28), and so is unlikely to be genuine (though several reputable classicists have suggested that it could be a reasonable paraphrase of one or other line in Thucydides); but its actual origins, and the means by which it came to be associated with Thucydides, have remained in darkness. Until now, or to be exact until a couple of weeks ago.

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New Adventures in Digital Humanities

In Köln today, having received an introduction to the Hellespont Project, a joint enterprise of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and the Universität Köln to produce a digital annotated version of the Pentekontaetia section of Thucydides. An experience, I must admit, that I found somewhat akin to having one’s brain removed, slapped around a few times and reinserted in a slightly different position. That is no reflection on my hosts, who were astonishingly generous with their time, but on my lamentable ignorance of all this digital humanities stuff. At times like this, one can’t help lapsing into Rumsfeldisch: I knew that I didn’t know much about certain things, but had no idea of all the things about which I don’t have the faintest hint of a clue.

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Reuse, Recycle

Have just finished the paper that I’m giving in Freiburg on Thursday evening on Thukydides und der moderne Geschichtsbegriff, focusing on the fascinating 1842 book on the subject by the later historical economist Wilhelm Roscher, and thought that I could easily make it available here for any readers of German who might be interested. It’ll be just the second time that I’ve attempted to give a paper in German – I do strongly believe in trying to do this, as a blow against the increasing dominance of English in the world of classics and ancient history, but it’s a fairly terrifying prospect for someone like me who is essentially self-taught (albeit I read a lot of novels and detective fiction in German, and regularly watch Biathlon). This is, therefore, simply a revised version of the first paper I ever gave in German, in Bielefeld in 2011, and it’s basically a modified translation of a paper that I’ve given a few times in English and have now published in the collection on the modern reception of Thucydides I edited with Katherine Harloe.

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Roman Globalisation

Students of the ancient economy are all too familiar with the situation of being in the middle of a debate and slowly realising that the entire thing has been operating at cross purposes without anyone noticing. Most often, this is because discussion focuses on substantive matters, with questions of theory and interpretative frameworks pushed firmly into the background or ignored altogether; it’s perfectly possible even for someone like me to talk about a topic like Roman bakeries for some time before it becomes clear to me, if not to my interlocutor, that we’re agreeing on a specific point on the basis of diametrically opposite assumptions and conceptions. I must admit that my usual reaction to this situation is to feel embarrassed and uncomfortable; it feels quite rude and aggressive to switch the discussion to the theoretical or methodological level, like a dubious rhetorical move or illegitimate exercise of academic authority – and that’s almost certainly how it would be received; at any rate that’s how it felt whenever the late Keith Hopkins did it to me when I was a PhD student – but at the same time I fervently believe that you can’t do history properly without examining your preconceptions, considering the broader implications of your ideas and so forth, and so I feel I ought to say something to make it clear that we’re agreeing just on this point, not on everything else.

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Thucydides the Neoliberal

Re-reading Marshall Sahlins’ Apologies to Thucydides yesterday, I was struck by his characterisation of the malign influence of the ancient Greek in a way I hadn’t been before. In my previous reading, perhaps because this was what I was most interested in at the time, Thucydides seemed to be being presented above all as a symbol of and/or cause of the narrow perspective of traditional historiography, excluding cultural and social factors from serious consideration and concentrating on politics, narrowly conceived in nationalistic terms. This is a critique that dates back at least to the late nineteenth century and the reaction against the dominance of the Rankeans, and appears in a less developed form much earlier, most often in the confrontation of Thucydides and Herodotus as different models of historiography, where the latter can be celebrated for his broad ethnographic and geographical interests and inclusive approach. This time, however, I realised how far Sahlins’ critique was not directed solely against historiography, but against an entire climate of thought in the modern West: the ‘neoliberal’ assumption that all human actions are intelligible in terms of crude, instrumentalist motives, driven by a universal ‘human nature’.

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Whither the Roman Economy?

Okay, we all know that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; what about judging it by its index? This thought is prompted by the especially detailed index of the new Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, edited by Walter Scheidel, a copy of which has just been delivered (the cover, incidentally, has a perfectly decent picture of a sculptural relief showing a ship arriving at Ostia – of course, we could think about the impression that such an image, rather than alternatives, is intended to create – and is a very nice red colour). I’m not going to have a chance to read the thing properly until some time next year, and as I have a short contribution therein to a discussion on Roman trade (because choosing any single one of the different contributors to write a single chapter on this controversial topic would have been problematic, I guess – or Walter wanted to stay on all our Christmas card lists) I’m not going to be asked to review it properly; I can therefore indulge in a few snap judgements without any serious consequences, or at least explore the results of making snap judgements on the basis of the index.

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